07 Jun DARK MONEY | No flies on Australia’s richest union

Imagine a company that received millions of dollars in government grants each year, paid no tax as it held charitable status, owned recruitment agencies and also owned a law firm that fought against penalty rates for young workers and workplace leave for victims of domestic violence.

There is such a company. It is called the NSW Business Chamber Limited. Its financial statements show the chamber recorded revenue of A$190 million last year, of which $5.8 million came in government grants.

It is difficult to tell without more intimate knowledge, but the accounts suggest the folk at the chamber may be living high on the hog.

“Direct salary and other costs of providing services” was $101 million last year (up sharply from $78 million in the prior year). A further $68 million was “employee benefits expense”, while the bill for cars was $2.8 million. The travel and entertainment chit was $2.5 million.

Chief executive Stephen Cartwright said today that the NSW Business Chamber had a strong focus on assisting SMEs (small to medium-sized enterprises) and conducting not-for-profit work such as training and apprentice schemes and advocacy. It was a “union” of sorts, he said, and like other unions it was a not-for-profit organisation.

Asked whether it was appropriate for the chamber to be claiming tax subsidies and government grants in view of the fact that it owned a law firm and recruitment agencies run to make a profit (and which, by their chamber parentage, immunised them from tax), Cartwright said these businesses helped to finance programs such as the chamber’s boot camp for unemployed youth in Western Sydney.

According to its financial statements, the chamber’s “core mission” is to “create a better Australia by maximising the outcome and potential of Australian businesses”.

There is a broader public interest issue at play here. While
other unions are struggling financially, the chamber is sitting on a plush investment portfolio of $184 million in shares, bonds and trusts, besides $13 million in cash.

The chamber owns the law firm, Australian Business Lawyers & Advisors Limited (ABL), and although ABL does not file financial accounts – as these are consolidated in the chamber’s accounts – it does appear to have a robust workload.

This week, ABL’s chief executive, Nigel Ward, and director of workplace relations, Luis Izzo, won a case in the Fair Work Commission that reduces penalty rates for workers in the hospitality industry.

These were big proceedings, which ran for 39 days, featured 130 lay witnesses, a dozen expert witnesses and nearly 6,000 public submissions.

The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) regulates charities at a federal level. Its records show the chamber was registered in 2014 under the criteria “purposes beneficial to the general public and analogous to the other charitable purposes”.

While pursuing charitable purposes, ABL, on behalf of the chamber, has appeared in a raft of common issue proceedings in recent years acting for employers against union and employee claims including:

• award flexibility

• leave for blood and bone marrow donors

• casual and part-time employment

• family and domestic violence leave.

In the latter proceedings, the ABL’s Nigel Ward opposed an ACTU claim and argued against leave entitlements for victims of domestic violence.

Cartwright “strongly disagreed” with the proposition that arguing against entitlements for low-paid workers and victims of domestic violence was not a charitable exercise.

“We are required to be there by the Fair Work Commission,” he said. “It’s a necessary part of the workplace relations system … Our job is to go down there and act in the best interest of the country and employment. Without this, capital walks away.”

On the matter of how businesses operating for a profit could be consolidated into the chamber’s accounts and therefore not pay tax, he said this practice was appropriate as the cashflow was expended in not-for-profit activities assisting the chamber’s 13,000 members.

The $2.8 million expense for motor vehicles was for a fleet used by customers, often in regional areas, Cartwright said, and executives did not have company cars.

The chamber’s auditor, PwC, picked up $437,000 last year and $565,000 the year before and appears to have a conflict of interest in that its non-audit fees for tax advice and such exceeded its audit fees.

The chamber has also made political donations disclosures over the years. Both major parties have been beneficiaries, with the bulk of donations going to the Liberal Party. It has also funded election advertising in NSW. However, Cartwright said the chamber was “fiercely non-political”.

Event Details

This paper studies the user experience of the experts who are invited to participate in the EIP surveys. The EIP questionnaire already includes a question about the difficulty of the questions . Although the distribution of the collected responses is encouraging, we have to deal with two problems: i) this distribution is based on the users who have completed the questionnaire (i.e. we do not know the responses of the experts who have dropped out of the survey before answering to this question) and ii) when experts answer that they have faced difficulties, we do not know which questions were difficult for them. To build a deeper understanding about the EIP questionnaire, this paper uses web survey paradata: User agent is used to identify experts responding to the survey using a smartphone. Item response times and drop-out points are used to identify the most difficult questions. The paper concludes with an overall evaluation of the EIP questionnaire and suggestions to improve the user experience for the EIP survey respondents.

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Join us for the launch of the latest Lowy Institute Paper published by Penguin Random House, Remaking the Middle East: How a Troubled Region May Save Itself, by Anthony Bubalo.
The Middle

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Join us for the launch of the latest Lowy Institute Paper published by Penguin Random House, Remaking the Middle East: How a Troubled Region May Save Itself, by Anthony Bubalo.

The Middle East is experiencing a period of concentrated turmoil unlike anything since the end of the Second World War. Uprisings, coups, and wars have seen governments overthrown, hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced.

Anthony Bubalo argues that the current tumult is the result of the irrevocable decay of the nizam – the system under which most states in the region are ruled. But amid the ferment there are also “green shoots” of change which could remake the Middle East in ways that are more inclusive, more democratic, less corrupt, and less violent.

Anthony Bubalo has worked on the Middle East for more than 25 years as a diplomat, intelligence analyst, and researcher. He has lived in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. He led the Lowy Institute’s Middle East research for 14 years, and regularly comments on the region’s politics in the Australian and international media.

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Abstract
Exile is most often associated with situations of banishment and diasporic communities. The concept has also been deployed metaphorically to signal large-scale social processes of ontological disembedding and associated paradoxical

Event Details

Abstract

Exile is most often associated with situations of banishment and diasporic communities. The concept has also been deployed metaphorically to signal large-scale social processes of ontological disembedding and associated paradoxical workings at the level of subjectivity. Under contemporary conditions experiences of exile acquire new ambiguities and intensities. Physical separation often cleaves apart from other possible modes of interaction. Related destabilisations in place-based relationships give rise to intensified memory work and newly reflexive subjectivities. Close attention to one Central Australian Aboriginal woman’s situation provides an intimate perspective from which to observe the conjunction of social forces at work in contemporary processes of displacement. Single-person focused ethnography conveys the gruelling experience of navigating exile and the imagined possible selves and lives this condition generates, offers and ultimately withholds.

About the speaker

Melinda Hinkson is an associate professor of anthropology and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. Much of her work is pursued at the interface between anthropology and visual cultural studies. She has published widely on Warlpiri media production and mediated relations, on the work of Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner, and on the contested cultural politics of the Northern Territory Intervention. Melinda’s 2014 book Remembering the Future: Warlpiri Life through the Prism of Drawing was accompanied by an exhibition she curated for the National Museum of Australia. Her current work focuses on the governance of Indigenous difference and on transformations in Warlpiri relations to place.